New York Post: Undermining Our Girls

Your daughter’s pretty little head needs an adjustment. The Girl Scouts of the USA, an organization that exists primarily to turn female children into professional pushers of Thin Mints, Samoas and Tagalongs, has joined a loud chorus of female-crushers.

The Girl Scouts Research Institute has just commissioned a suspect study that found an overwhelming number of Scouts — despite their forced entry into cookie capitalism — don’t think they have the smarts to balance checkbooks, handle credit cards or put enough pennies in a piggy bank to pay for college. And why not?

These children are as young as 8. Grow up!

It’s been a rough couple of months to be a member of the fair sex, a majority that, if you believe the hype, is made up primarily of losers, whiners and victims.

Last month, billionaire Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg published her awful book, “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” which sent a loud message destined to undermine ladies: If you want a family, a life, you’re a disappointment to the sisterhood.

If you’re not CEO of a Fortune 500 company yet, if you can’t afford to strut in Louboutins, then you’re not trying hard enough. It’s your fault.

The bash-women fest continued on April 9, a date which will live in infamy. That’s the annual Equal Pay Day holiday, set by an outfit called the National Committee on Pay Equity. It’s a doozy.

The committee insists that the average woman earns a lot less than a man, just 77 cents on every dollar he makes. By that logic, a woman has to work just over three extra months, until April 9, before she reaches the pay her male counterparts earned for the previous year.

Lest you disagree, President Obama cynically campaigned on the warped number last year. This month, he issued a proclamation stating, “But even now, too many Americans are seeing their hard work go unrewarded because of circumstances beyond their control.”

Then — drumroll, please — “I continue to call on the Congress to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act.”

This may be the first time, ever, that new federal regulations are supposed to lead to hiring more people. Especially women.

In truth, the argument is completely bogus.

“The way I see it, there’s a lot of good news for women and girls,” said Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. “But when the president and lawmakers paint society as hostile to women, it’s really unfortunate. I guess I am offended.”

The 77-cent statistic has been repeated so often, most Americans take it as gospel. But it’s wrong.

The number compares the median salaries of all workers. If you compare, say, teachers to teachers, corporate honchos to corporate honchos, if you take into account women who chose to jump off the fast track to have families, the pay gap magically disappears.

In fact, the median income for young, single, childless urban women is higher — sometimes much higher — than that of men, concluded a study by Reach Advisors, a Boston market-research firm.

This led the notoriously anti-women New York Times to write that superior female earning power is destroying young gals’ love lives.

“It’s not uncommon to walk into the hottest new West Village bistro on a Saturday night and find five smartly dressed young women dining together — the nearest man the waiter,” said a piece titled, “The End of Courtship?”

The Scouts survey found that a staggering 88 percent of cookie-peddlers, ages 8 to 17, don’t think they can cut it financially. Really?

“Women are the No. 1 consumers, from groceries to electronics to cars,” said Schaeffer. “To me, that suggests that women are financially literate.”

I asked the Scouts whether the organization used a defeatist mind-set. Did cookie mongers enter into the survey with the assumption that girls are genetically inferior to boys in ways of money? I never found out.

In an e-mail, the Scouts’ public-relations manager promptly called me, “a) a known misogynist b) looking for a headline.” (He later apologized.)

True misogynists (and that includes feminists) refuse to see how far women have come. Surveys like the Scouts’, people like Sandberg, and holidays designed to make us look weak don’t empower girls and women. They infantilize us.

That’s not equality.

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Independent Women’s Forum’s mission is to improve the lives of Americans by increasing the number of women who value free markets and personal liberty. Sister organization of Independent Women’s Voice.